Il costrutto temporale con 'essere' in italiano antico

The present article deals with the temporal costruction with essere followed or preceded by an expression of time measure in Old Italian, as in Ora sono quattro giorni ch’io mi stava nella mia casa, e orava ‘I have been praying in my house for four days’.The objective of the current study is to explore the possible differences between the temporal construction with essere in Old Italian and the temporal cleft in Modern Italian. A database consisting of 264 examples occurring in Old Italian texts has been created to achieve this. An analysis concerning the following features has been carried out on the 264 occurences: a) the verb agreement with the expression of time measure; b) the relative position of essere with respect to the temporal phrase; c) the tense of essere; c) the position of the sentence describing the state of affairs (e.g. io mi stava nella mia casa e orava in the above example) with respect to the temporal structure; d) the presence of the subordinator che. In the last section of the work the differences with the temporal cleft in Modern Italian emerged during the analysis are highlighted